Ruins Of Atlanta (BB2e) FR:Introduction
Les Ruines d'Atlanta apportent des informations sur l'Univers Kalos se focalisant particulièrement sur ceux ayant choisi de vivre au beau milieu des contrecoups de la Chute de Paragon, là où ce "héros" détruisit la cité à lui seul.
Ce livre présuppose que quelques années se sont écoulées depuis la Chute de Paragon. Le manuel original de Bulletproof Blues a été écrit en 2010 et se déroulait "peu après" ladite Chute. Le présent ouvrage suppose donc que le temps à fait son œuvre et que nous sommes maintenant en 2015. Les errants ont maintenant vécus assez longtemps parmi les ruines pour s'y établir, prospérer, et se trouver en conflit les uns avec les autres. Sur une période de cinq ans, les ressources des ruines ont été consommées, rendant la vie plus difficile. Malgré tout, en leur sein, certaines factions ont été capable de reconstruire.
Les Ruines d'Atlanta vous offrent une opportunité toute particulière de marier jeux de rôles post-apocalyptiques et de super-héros. Vous trouverez ici bien des clichés du post-cataclysmique : des hordes anarchiques de pillards, de jeunes idéalistes en quête d'un monde meilleur, des cyniques blasés prêt à tout pour survivre, des seigneurs de la guerre avides de pouvoir, des fanatiques religieux, des enclaves high-tech ; et même, de temps en temps, un mutant. Dans ce monde, des super-héros feront brutalement contraste.
Lorsqu’il s’agira de faire intervenir les ruines dans une campagne, meneurs et joueurs auront plusieurs choix. Si vous cherchez une courte aventure d’une seule session, les héros pourraient facilement y être envoyé à la poursuite d’un vilain, ou pour y récupérer quelque objet. Alternativement, si vos objectifs sont plus épiques et grandioses, ils pourraient s’installer dans les ruines, se ranger derrière une des factions présente, et se faire prendre dans les visées à long terme de la Pyramide, du Terminus, de l’ARC, ou de tout autre groupuscule moins important vivotant péniblement dans les décombres d’Atlanta.
A Brief History Of Atlanta
The land occupied by the ruined city of Atlanta was, in the 18th century, inhabited by the Native American Creek and Cherokee tribes. As was true in so much of North America, the tribes were driven out by the expanding United States government, and a white settlement existed here as early as 1822. The effort to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made the spot a railway hub; the prospective name “Atlantica-Pacifica” was shortened to “Atlanta” and adopted in 1847.
By the Civil War, Atlanta was a critical manufacturing and transportation hub, part of the cotton distribution system and home to a rolling mill that produced cannon, iron rail, and the 2-inch-thick iron plates which coated the hull of the CSS Virginia. Roughly a fifth of the city’s population of 15,000 were black slaves. General Sherman invaded with the combined Armies of the Cumberland, Ohio and the Tennessee – over 100,000 troops – and the city was burned on November 11, 1864, after an occupation lasting about a month. The destruction of Atlanta would leave a scar on the psyches of Georgians and residents of the South for almost a hundred and fifty years, until it was supplanted by something even worse.
Reconstruction saw a tremendous influx of refugees and newly-freed blacks to Atlanta, who found work in the construction industry. Newly founded black colleges in Atlanta contributed to the rise of one of America’s oldest African-American elite, despite the existence of poll taxes and other Jim Crow laws which completely disenfranchised the black vote. Electric streetcars and Coca-Cola were introduced, and the Georgia School of Technology opened. Atlanta became the state capital, Georgia’s largest city, while the wealthiest families moved to the suburbs of the West End and Inman Park.
Race riots in 1906 were a sign of continuing tension, and black businesses moved to areas in town they considered safe, especially “Sweet” Auburn Avenue. The entire city was segregated, separate but by no means equal; parks were for whites only, black Atlantans had to sit in the back of street cars or give their seats up to whites, and in their daily life blacks were expected to defer to whites at every opportunity, acknowledging white superiority and reinforcing black inferiority. A fire in 1917 destroyed 10,000 homes, only the latest in a series of tragedies which Atlanta would continue to suffer in the century to come.
The Great Depression dealt so much ruin to Atlanta’s economy that the Coca-Cola Company had to bail out the city’s deficit. Gone With The Wind won Academy Awards and refreshed the trauma of Atlanta’s destruction at Sherman’s hands, but none of the black cast were allowed to attend the 1939 premiere in the city, during which 300,000 people filled the streets to glorify an idealized Old South. The population and economy boomed during the war; Delta Airlines settled here in 1941, and in 1946 the Centers for Disease Control was established.
Atlanta was central to the Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King, Jr was arrested here along with black college students during an early sit-in in 1960. The desegregation of trolleys, restaurants, and schools began soon after but would take a decade to complete. By the 1970s, blacks were a majority in Atlanta; white flight and the construction of shopping malls around Atlanta knocked a hole in the bottom of what had been a historic and bustling downtown – which then remade itself as convention facilities, office space, and governmental buildings. Atlanta’s first black mayor was elected in 1973, the new MARTA rail system began operation in 1979, and in 1986 the city became home to the Southern Cross, the most prominent team of posthuman heroes in the region. The Southern Cross’s most notable case was the so-called Criminal Olympics, during which virtually every costumed posthuman criminal in the world converged on Atlanta over a single month in 1996.
In 2010, when Paragon attacked Atlanta, the city was in the middle of transformations which have become common in many American cities. Downtown was being gentrified, a process by which affluent and well educated whites move in, housing costs rise, and the black population leaves the city for distant suburbs. Paragon ended all that, going on a day-long rampage of destruction that proved unstoppable. National Guard and the Southern Cross were utterly incapable of restraining the greatest of Earth’s posthumans, and most died for their efforts. Virtually all of Atlanta’s great landmarks were damaged or shattered, killing thousands, and Paragon slaughtered thousands more when, using a MARTA train in a perverse game of crack the whip, he knocked passenger jets out of the sky as they entered Atlanta airspace, crashing them into the crowded streets below. Paragon left only after he had proven to the world that no one could dislodge him.